Jonathan Griffin

In the cultural history of Los Angeles, it’s an indelible scene: the 19-year-old Edward Ruscha and his friend, the musician Mason Williams, tearing down Route 66 in a customised Ford from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. Ruscha’s arrival in 1956 in the still-young city and his excitement at its signs and buildings, its colours and its surfaces, inflected most of his art over the coming decades. Even if his enthusiasm is sometimes tempered by unease, or a wry quizzicality, Ruscha is generally considered the artist-laureate of Los Angeles.